Professor Margaret Scott Robinson FMedSci FRS

Professor of Molecular Cell Biology, Cambridge Institute for Medical Research, University of Cambridge

Robinson is the foremost expert on the adaptins, proteins which recruit transmembrane receptors to budding vesicles and play a key role in endocytosis and protein sorting. She identified and characterised the clathrin-associated adaptors AP-1 and AP-2, and provided crucial insights into how they recognise different membranes. She identified further adaptors with distinct roles, namely AP-3, AP-4 and the GGA proteins, and discovered the physiological roles of AP-3 by analysing mouse mutants. Robinson has made major contributions to our understanding of the specific interactions, cargo selection and targeted assembly of the adaptor proteins, and thus to some of the key events in intracellular membrane traffic.